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Welcome to this year's 26th issue of DistroWatch Weekly! This week's issue features a first look review of Xandros Desktop 4, a new version of the commercial desktop distribution released last week. Is it worth the asking price? As always, it depends... In the news section we'll take a brief look at DrakLive, a script responsible for creating all recent builds of Mandriva One, highlight what looks like growing dissatisfaction with the state of affairs among Gentoo developers, and direct your attention to a couple of interesting links - a Creative Commons & Fedora Project competition and a desktop NetBSD guide. Finally, good news for the fans of Ruby on Rails - a new PCLinuxOS-based live CD features a complete and pre-configured Ruby on Rails development environment for the coders of databased-backed web applications. Happy reading!

SLED 10 offers unmatched ease-of-use, polish, and hardware support

In this week's KDE Commit-Digest: Support for the Encapsulated PostScript format in KViewShell. Important progress in Strigi desktop search. The beginnings of LastFM support for Amarok, whilst the experimental interface layout is reverted - for the time being, at least. Import into KDE SVN of the "GMail-style conversation view for KMail" project, with breakthrough progress in the "OSCAR (AIM) File Transfer" project, both for the Summer Of Code. Ingredient substitution functionality in KRecipes.

On June 5-7th the Korean version of the LinuxWorld Conference and Expo series opened its doors for the first time in Seoul. The visitors could learn about various Asian distributions which use KDE including Haansoft.

The future of US government IT systems will include a big focus on converting old data into electronic form, two federal government IT leaders say.

There’s no shortage of smart, employable IT workers. There is a shortage of flexible employers who are willing to hire people who don’t match an exact, niche profile or have a very specific skill or type of experience.
[...]
They’ll never get noticed, because the candidate-screening software has already chucked them into the waste bin. The software doesn’t know, of course, that someone with good Windows administration skills can learn Linux skills to become the new Linux administrator who’s desperately needed.

For the diligent, 'free' really does mean free

[Ok, so it's not directly about FOSS, but it deals with both senses of "free". -- grouch]

Tux's less famous sister answers even your silliest questions on Linux and open source software.

If you grind away in Microsoft Office for a living, the idea of a spreadsheet, word processor, photo editor or calendar that exists only as code on a Web page might seem ridiculous.

The Camino Project has launched the latest version of their Camino browser now in version 1.0.2. This browser uses the same rendering engine used by Mozilla Firefox and is available exclusively for the Mac OS platform.

Software outfit Novell has shuffled its senior management pack after the Board of Directors ousted CEO Jack Messman and CFO Joseph Tibbetts. Ron Hovsepian has stepped into the CEO hot seat with Dana Russell, previously VP of finance and corporate controller taking on the role of interim CFO.

Delivers Improved Hardware And Crypto Interface Support For Security OEMs

Groklaw's own Sean Daly was in Barcelona at the 3rd International GPLv3 Conference in Barcelona, Spain, this week, and while there, he had the opportunity to interview Richard Stallman [as Ogg (3.8 MB)] . He asked Mr. Stallman what programmers should focus on next, about DRM, binary drivers, proposed changes to the GPL, and what he feels he has yet to accomplish.

My recent column about "free software" generated some interesting responses, leading me to the conclusion that there is much confusion in the general public about software licensing, and some differing points of view.

Debian Based Linux Distributions and Live CD's list

This HowTo is about creating a user-session-safe directory which offers security on- and offline. This is done with PAM, a module named pam_script and EncFS ("Encrypted Filesystem"). This safe directory is used to store credentials and other sensitive information during a session. When a usersession is ended, in the worst case an encrypted directory remains on the harddrive. In the best case everything is removed. This construction is only meant to store information during a session, not for documents or any other valid information.

Hey, it's our old friend FUD making an appearance yet again! FUD, of course, stands for "fear, uncertainty and doubt," and is a weapon that Microsoft has long been accused of using to stave off competition and try to sow just enough doubt in customers' minds to back them off from using non-Microsoft products.

OS X is certainly a beautiful operating system, and I universally recommend it to people who don’t want to learn about their computer or don’t have an experienced Unix-using friend close at hand. For me, though, it’s more of an inspiration than an aspiration.

Back by popular demand (6 people said they liked it), here is the list of links to all stories posted on LXer from Sunday, June 18, through Saturday, June 24, 2006. There were 251 stories posted to LXer during this past week. Wednesday and Saturday each had 43 stories, with Sunday being the slow day at 23.

(By the way, creating this list involved only free software and I am once again grateful to Ben Okopnik for his tutorial, The Deep, Dark Secrets of Bash.)

This week, the Eclipse Foundation will celebrate its most significant release to date, Callisto, an update that incorporates 10 linked projects in the IDE. Partners say the release is a major milestone on Eclipse's path to becoming the IT industry's de facto Java development platform.